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These books, which seem like pastimes in the midst of Howells's serious work, are likely to live long, not only as playful autobiographic records, but as vivid pictures of life in the middle west in the middle of the nineteenth century.
"We, the children of the house, " says De Quincey, in his "Autobiographic Sketches," "stood, in fact, upon the very happiest tier in the social scaffolding for all good influences. The prayer of Agur 'Give me neither poverty nor riches' was realized for us. That blessing we had, being neither too high nor too low.
Freud, Selected Papers on Hysteria and Other Psychoneuroses, 3d edition, translated by A.A. Brill, N.Y. Nerv. and Ment. Dis. Pub. Co. Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph, Series No. 4. Havelock Ellis, in an appendix to his study on the Sexual Impulse, 1903, gives a number of autobiographic reports of normal persons treating their first sexual feelings in childhood and the causes of the same.
The artist, in a desultory manner, had imparted to Phoebe something of his history. Young as he was, and had his career terminated at the point already attained, there had been enough of incident to fill, very creditably, an autobiographic volume. A romance on the plan of Gil Blas, adapted to American society and manners, would cease to be a romance.
The kind of life that was led by the family is more vividly sketched by his daughter in her reminiscences of the time, and her pages afford the only full companion picture to those of the Old Manse and the Berkshire cottage, and to some extent supply the lack of that autobiographic background to "The Marble Faun" which the reader misses in Hawthorne's own preface.
It were to be wished that more writers possessed of some literary skill, who have borne a part in the wonderful drama involving men and events enacted in this country during the century now drawing to a close, had given us their sincere personal impressions in autobiographic form.
All who have read the autobiographic Apologia will remember the fine passage in which its author tells us that ever since his conversion there have been two, and only two, absolutely self-luminous beings in the whole universe of being to him, God and his own soul.
May that be far from us, as we take up our Pickwick and talk over the autobiographic pathos of David Copperfield. This vivid sympathy with the man is made stronger in my own case in that, from my own boyhood till his death, I was continually seeing him, was frequently his neighbour both in London and the seaside, knew some of his friends, and heard much about him and about his work.
But it never saw the light; his attempts to get it published were unsuccessful, and at last, in a fit of irritation and despair, the young author burned the manuscript. There is probably something autobiographic in the striking little tale of The Devil in Manuscript. "They have been offered to seventeen publishers," says the hero of that sketch in regard to a pile of his own lucubrations.
But it shares with the poems shortly to be noticed what may be called the autobiographic charm. The fresh natural emotion of a young and brilliant mind is eternally interesting, and Coleridge's youthful Muse, with a frankness of self- disclosure which is not the less winning because at times it provokes a smile, confides to us even the history of her most temporary moods.
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